Arizona Architecture: Taliesin West
Every great architect is – necessarily – a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
There are a lot of attractions in Phoenix, Arizona that vie for your time and attention—meandering through the Desert Botanic Gardens, shopping in Old Town Scottsdale, hiking around Camelback Mountain.
If you’re taking a trip to Arizona, allow me to add something to your can’t-miss-list: a tour of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home, Taliesin West.
Much like the Grand Canyon, Frank Lloyd Wright really needs no introduction. Even to readers who aren’t interested in architecture or design, the name will ring familiar, and rightly so.
Architect, designer, writer, and educator Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs are famous for many reasons: he was the purveyor of organic architecture, philosopher behind the Prairie Style, and a prophet preaching the theory of form and function. His creative period spanned more than 70 years, during which he designed over 1,000 structures, 532 of them which came to completion.
Wright, who was born in 1867 and died in 1959, believed that America needed an architecture that would reflect its truly unique character. His structures were “designed for democracy,” as he pursued a design to nourish the lives of the everyman, and developed from within, pushing outwards in order to harmonize with nature.
He established Taliesin West, his winter home, in 1937, after purchasing several hundred acres of land in the foothills of northeast Scottsdale, near Phoenix.
We joined a morning tour of the campus, where our tour guide, a retired architect, led us deliberately through each room, explaining Wright’s philosophy, the history of the building, and the architecture itself.
Our guide explained that the name “Taliesin” was inspired by Wright’s Welsh ancestry: in Welsh, Taliesin means “shining brow,” a nod to the way Wright designed the home to sit at the base of the Arizona foothills.
At the entrance to Taliesin West is a rock bearing a whirling arrow design, which is an ancient Hohokam petroglyph that now is the symbol of the winter estate.
Wright constructed this home using largely “desert masrony”: local rocks bound by cement and desert sand, in order to preserve and embed the desert environment.
He draped the roofs with canvas to shield inhabitants from the sun and open the interiors to floods of light, and connected each building with walkways, gardens, pools, and terraces. After construction, Wright spent every winter at Taliesin West until his death.
During the two-hour tour, we learned that Frank Lloyd Wright got a lot less sleep than you and I do: aside from the hundreds of buildings he designed and the school he ran, he was also a pretty fanatic movie buff (we learned that he liked to watch the unedited, ten-hour versions of the movies shown in theaters), a prolific author, a curator of the arts, and a dazzling host, opening his home for dinner shows at which his students would give performances.
We ended our visit in a large theatre space where Wright used to host these dinner parties and performances.
After our tour guide gave a demonstration of the acoustic perfection of the space (which involved a tiny music box playing Fur Elise), he left us with a few quotes to remind us of the brilliance of the man who designed these spaces. As we exited the home, one of the quotes stayed with me, echoing in my mind as I stepped back into the desert:
The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.
Taliesin West was the perfect place to be reminded of our capacity to appreciate and abide in such a beautiful world. I hope you get a chance to see this place for yourself someday.
